Also a Poet: An Evening with Ada Calhoun

When Ada Calhoun stumbled upon old tapes of interviews that her father—The New Yorker’s celebrated art critic Peter Schjeldahl—had conducted for a never-completed biography of the poet Frank O’Hara, she set out to finish the book her father had started 40 years earlier. The result is Also a Poet, a groundbreaking and kaleidoscopic literary memoir that made Vogue’s and Esquire’s “Best Books” lists this year.

Calhoun’s account alternates hard-nosed biographical sleuthing with the moving, honest, and tender story of a complicated father-daughter bond. What happens when we want to do better than our parents, yet fear what that might cost us?

The New York Times Book Review calls this riveting, candid autobiography “a grand slam…a big valentine to New York City past and present, and a contribution to literary scholarship, molten with soul.”











When: Thu., Sep. 15, 2022 at 8:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Where: The National Arts Club
15 Gramercy Park S.
212-475-3424
Price: Free, donation suggested
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When Ada Calhoun stumbled upon old tapes of interviews that her father—The New Yorker’s celebrated art critic Peter Schjeldahl—had conducted for a never-completed biography of the poet Frank O’Hara, she set out to finish the book her father had started 40 years earlier. The result is Also a Poet, a groundbreaking and kaleidoscopic literary memoir that made Vogue’s and Esquire’s “Best Books” lists this year.

Calhoun’s account alternates hard-nosed biographical sleuthing with the moving, honest, and tender story of a complicated father-daughter bond. What happens when we want to do better than our parents, yet fear what that might cost us?

The New York Times Book Review calls this riveting, candid autobiography “a grand slam…a big valentine to New York City past and present, and a contribution to literary scholarship, molten with soul.”

Buy tickets/get more info now